Two months after being removed from the UFC’s rankings out of spite, Nate Diaz is still M.I.A. Well, he’s not missing in the traditional sense, as much as he’s taking an extended break from MMA competition (a “Stocktation”, if you will) until the UFC meets his likely insane salary demands. Well, not *insane* salary demands, but something much higher than his longtime promotion is willing to fork over.

But seeing as Dana White has *never* ended a relationship on good terms (“Mrs. Janice from 8th grade Chemistry is a f*cking joke!”), it means that now is about the time for him to start discrediting Diaz using as many fudged numbers and blatant lies as he can fit into a media scrum before his head starts glowing red with rage. You know, kind of like how he treats the history of mixed martial arts.

From his interview with MMAFighting published earlier today, here are just a couple of the lies White spun in an attempt to convince us that Nate Diaz was never that good anyway.

Dana White: “You realize he’s like 1-3 in his last three fights? He’s 1-3, he’s nowhere near a title fight, he’s never won a title, and he doesn’t move the needle.”

Reality: Well, one cannot be 1-3 in their past three fights, because math, but Diaz is 1-2 in his past three fights, with his sole win coming over former title challenger Gray Maynard. So, you know, a tomato can.

We here at CagePotato.com aren’t the types to say “We told you so,” which is convenient, because we couldn’t even gather enough interest in BJ Penn vs. Frankie Edgar III to mock it beforehand. The fight ended predictably; Penn continued to be no match for Edgar, and “The Prodigy” hinted at yet another retirement from MMA after it was over. Given the trilogy’s one-sided nature and predictable ending, we’re tempted to call it the most pointless trilogy in our sport’s history. But doing so would do the following trilogies a grave injustice:

Bryan Robinson vs. Andrew Reinard

A quick glance at the record of every ironman in MMA will reveal multiple victories over fighters who can best be described as “victims” and “warm bodies.” Reinard is Exhibit A: You can watch his entire three-fight career in only forty-eight seconds.
[Author Note: Robinson vs. Reinard is a stand-in for every pointless trilogy that other MMA ironmen have been involved in. Coincidentally, Robinson himself accounts for seven (?!?) of Travis Fulton's career victories.]

Until yesterday, however, when MMAFighting managed to get ahold of the ever-elusive Stocktonian and pressed him on his current standing with the promotion. Diaz’s response was a rant against the current state of fighter pay so vivid and thorough that we’re still not convinced it wasn’t spoken through his anger translator:

I’m ready to fight but not for some funny money that they’re trying to give me. They can let me go or they can let me fight, but let me do something. They know I need to make some money. I feel like they’re just trying to keep me on the waiting list. I don’t even want to communicate through anybody. If they want to figure out what’s going on, we should talk. No one is contacting me. I’m just doing my thing. Training every day. I’m ready to fight tomorrow.

They need to be about more money. My contract is all f*cked up. I want to be paid like these other fighters. I’m over here getting chump change. At this point, they’re paying all my partners and other people I train with are getting real money, and it’s too embarrassing for me to even fight again for the money they’re paying me. So they can either pay me or let me go. I’m with that.

Of course, being that Melendez *was* able to reach an agreement with the UFC after calling their bluff, it comes as something of a surprise that former lightweight title challenger Nate Diaz is now asking to be released from his contract. But that’s what happened yesterday, unless Diaz’s Twitter was somehow hacked. Diaz sent out the above tweet last night, stating “It’s time for me to be on my way…?” This of course, can only mean one of four things:

We won’t waste much of your time with another behind-the-scenes look into the life of Nick Diaz, but there is something fascinating — sublime, really — about these videos that we here at CagePotato simply cannot look away from. The latest entry (and by “latest,” we mean uploaded in 2009) in the Diaz saga, entitled “family vids 1,” eclipses even “You can get organic food with welfare“ on our list of all-time favorite Diaz moments captured on film, so we simply had to pass it along in lieu of any news worth writing about. You know, for science.

Despite being less than a minute in length, “family vids 1″ tells us more about the Diaz family than a million hostile interviews ever could. Revelations include:

-The Diaz family is not the real-life cast of The Wire, as previously understood
-Even when surrounded by family, Nick Diaz is paralyzed by social anxiety
-The Diaz’s have a harder time figuring out cameras than they do blenders.
-Nate Diaz *loves* posing for photos.

That last epiphany is easily the most shocking, especially to someone who once asked Nate for a photo at an MMA convention and was told to “take a short walk off a tall building.” Clearly Diaz doesn’t understand physics, because that…would’ve…killed…me…

“Nate Diaz has been talking so much and in his last fight, he actually looked pretty decent, but it’s harder to judge against Gray Maynard,” Pettis said on UFC Tonight. “I hope Nate works his way up so we can fight…Nate’s been talking for a while. Even after his last fight, saying ‘this is the No. 1 and No. 2 lightweights in the world.’ That’s taking a shot directly at me. That belt’s in my front room. It’s there for a reason.”**

In classic Diaz fashion, Nate responded on twitter by saying that Pettis needs to work his way up for a fight against Nate Diaz. (#stocktonlogic) Though Pettis seems to think that Diaz should keep fighting and winning before an eventual title-fight showdown, Diaz would rather skip that part entirely. In case you missed it, he made a startlingly wise statement about the subject during the TUF 18 Finale’s post-fight press conference last Saturday: